{"id":7128,"date":"2014-04-11T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/polarbear60.org\/randr\/?p=7128"},"modified":"2025-04-20T13:29:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-20T18:29:40","slug":"tech-stuff-mac-backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/tech-stuff-mac-backup\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Stuff: Mac Backup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Computer backup solutions are a challenge.\u00a0 You don’t know if they really<\/em> work until you need them.\u00a0 Then it’s too late to find out they don’t.\u00a0 Since shortly after I got my Mac Mini in November of 2008, I’ve had a one terabyte external USB drive connected to it that I’ve used Mac’s back up utility Time Machine to faithfully do a regular automated backup of my hard drive.\u00a0 I’ve never really needed it, until this week.\u00a0 And, even this week, I didn’t really need it, but I wanted it to work.\u00a0 And it just didn’t.\u00a0 I suspected as much would be the case, because when I bought my new MacBook Pro Retina in December, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to use my MacMini Time Machine back ups to move my apps and data to this great new machine?”\u00a0 Except it wasn’t nice.\u00a0 The only nice thing was I had done a Time Machine backup of the new machine before attempting to migrate my Mini apps and data to the machine using the one terabyte external hard drive.\u00a0 Good thing, because on the third attempt to get migration to work, something screwed up very badly, and the new machine was not recognizing any password I tried to use (you can imagine what a sinking feeling it is to have a brand new machine nearly bricked).\u00a0 I restored from the Time Machine backup to get my basic machine back.\u00a0 Whew.\u00a0 I manually downloaded and installed apps, and Dropbox *<\/a> is still my friend.\u00a0 In fact, Dropbox is my lifeline!\u00a0 Without Dropbox, I wouldn’t have my data.<\/p>\n

Because of the experience in December with the Retina, I pretty much knew when the Apple Store had to wipe my hard drive to update to Lion (the drive wasn’t formatted correctly — something I must have goofed when I swapped out my original 80Gb hard drive for a more spacious 750Gb hard drive) that I would likely have trouble when I tried to migrate my Time Machine back up back onto the Mini when I got it home.\u00a0 After supposedly only needing less than a minute to complete the migration for three days, I abandoned efforts to migrate automatically, and accessed the backup on the disk manually (that, generally, worked).\u00a0 I dragged things from the backup to the 750Gb hard drive. I installed App Store purchases from the App Store.\u00a0 That worked fairly well, except for the apps that have been updated to require Mavericks.\u00a0 I was able to drag older versions from the back up and use those (Typist was the big one there.)\u00a0 Other apps dragged and dropped well, and I re-entered registration data and had to do some configuring.\u00a0 This saved me the hassle of having to download the app, so that was useful.<\/p>\n

I posted a little about my woes on Facebook, and my friend, Melody, steered me toward an app she’d recently heard being recommended called SuperDuper!.\u00a0 What I like about this app is it creates a bootable backup (if you want one).\u00a0 I’ve decided to abandon Time Machine (I re-partitioned the hard drives to keep a couple old backups just to be on the safe side, but SuperDuper! will have it’s own partition) and use SuperDuper!\u00a0 I still use Dropbox for all data and anything I need to access from more than one computer.\u00a0 All I had to do on the Mini was install Dropbox, and my data downloaded — including photos.\u00a0 I’d been using the free version of Dropbox until last fall, then I ran out of space, and I didn’t have an easy way to get more free space quickly, so I have been a paid customer of Dropbox since then, and I don’t regret it for an instant.<\/p>\n

To recap, I’ve abandoned Time Machine.\u00a0 I’m using SuperDuper! to create a regular bootable backup of my system.\u00a0 But the real key for me is still Dropbox.\u00a0 I’m evaluating off-site backup services, and, so far, if I decide to go that route, I’ll probably use CrashPlan<\/a>.\u00a0 A friend got caught in the nasty Western Digital upgrade to Mavericks hard drive crash (that process killed one of my backup drives, too), and he recovered his wife’s photography business via CrashPlan.\u00a0 The same article recommending SuperDuper! also recommended CrashPlan.<\/p>\n

Dropbox is my friend.\u00a0 I use Dropbox for nearly everything.<\/p>\n

* If you use this link and complete a sign up for Dropbox<\/a>, we will each receive and additional 500Mb are storage space on Dropbox.\u00a0 If you don’t want to use my link to earn that little benefit for both of us, just go to http:\/\/www.dropbox.com and sign up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Computer backup solutions are a challenge.\u00a0 You don’t know if they really work until you need them.\u00a0 Then it’s too late to find out they don’t.\u00a0 Since shortly after I got my Mac Mini in November of 2008, I’ve had a one terabyte external USB drive connected to it that …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7128"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16382,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7128\/revisions\/16382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}